Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!nrl-cmf!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!arktouros!dyer
From: dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU (Steve Dyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: How did they make the printer so expensive?
Message-ID: <7542@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 19 Oct 88 01:18:52 GMT
References: <5807@zodiac.UUCP> <17784@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU (Steve Dyer)
Organization: MIT Project Athena, Cambridge MA 02139
Lines: 23

In article <17784@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle) writes:
>$2000 is not a particularly good price for a laser printer. The slight
>increase in resolution (from 300 to 400 dpi) is not spectacular; there are
>already 600dpi machines out.  Yes, it's cheap for a PostScript printer, but
>it isn't a PostScript printer, it's a dumb printer with a PostScript emulator
>in the host.  No big deal here.

I don't understand these sentiments.  400 dpi is 77% greater resolution than
300 dpi; this is slight?  If the NeXT printer actually achieves this at its
price, it's impressive.  The only other machine I know of with this resolution
is from Agfa/Compugraphic and it's many times more expensive.  The 600dpi
machines that I know of are comparable or even more expensive (> $10K).
I would think that having a fast Postscript interpreter in the host with
a fast pipe to a dumb laser printer is far preferable to a slow Postscript
interpreter sitting on the other end of a 9600 baud serial line.

I think some people are much too quick to fire arrows into the backs of the
NeXT designers.  The tradeoffs are, at least, understandable, and I think
defensible.

---
Steve Dyer
dyer@arktouros.MIT.EDU
dyer@spdcc.COM aka {harvard,husc6,ima,bbn,m2c,mipseast}!spdcc!dyer